Guy Pearce is Going Queer

According to Rampart director Oren Moverman, Pearce, along with Ben Foster and Kelly MacDonald, will be taking on a film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, with none other than Steve Buscemi directing.

Moverman, who told New York Magazine that he wrote the script for the film 10 years ago, explained that it’s no small feat the film was leaping from the almost-never-seen page to the big screen.

According to Rampart director Oren Moverman, Pearce, along with Ben Foster and Kelly MacDonald, will be taking on a film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer, with none other than Steve Buscemi directing.

Moverman, who told New York Magazine that he wrote the script for the film 10 years ago, explained that it’s no small feat the film was leaping from the almost-never-seen page to the big screen.

"Queer was written with Junkie, which was the first Burroughs book, but it was never published because the publisher said, you know, 'I've got Junkie, you want to put Queer in there? How far can I push this thing?'" he said.

"So it wasn't published until 1984. It was written in 1952. And once it was published, it was really the story of William S. Burroughs kind of discovering himself as a writer by being obsessed with this boy. And there's very little in it about the wife, but what's happening at the same time is it's the time where [Burroughs] killed his wife, you know, during the whole famous William Tell routine. So that's sort of the incident that we started working with and built this whole movie around."

And while interest in the Beats is always high – remember James Franco’s 2010 Howl? — things are still slowly falling into place for this project. "It's still in the early stages of the actual making because Steve, as you know, is a little busy with his show he's doing on HBO,” Moverman said. “Once he has his hiatus next time around, after the next season, we're going to go shoot this movie. God willing.”

But at least someone had agreed to pay for what’s sure to be a weird, experimental, pretty gay film, right?

"Not completely, no," he admitted to the reporter before asking if he had any extra cash sitting around.